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"I feast my eyes to feed my dreams." Futuristic Paris, "a frightful heat," an amorous epidemic. (STBO, a retrovirus infecting those who make love without love, cf. Menzies' Things to Come.) Sagging hoods sans shirts plan to steal the serum, Chatterbox the cardsharp-ventriloquist (Denis Lavant) joins the gang. The boss (Michel Piccoli) keeps a moony mistress (Juliette Binoche) who captivates the lad while his own girlfriend (Julie Delpy) zips around town astride a motorcycle, the proper roundelay of l'amour et la mort. A most abstruse fever by Leos Carax, who casts himself as the friendly neighborhood voyeur, "a noble trade." The punk-artist's condition, clashes with father figures, rivalry with l'américaine. The romantic abyss is faced with parachutes, a characteristic instance of conceptual lyricism exploded by exhilarating physicality. Visages filmed as if the close-up had just been invented, tenderly caressed one moment and made into Baldessari abstractions the next. Cocteau at the café, "youth's gift of surprise at not understanding," slashed palm to starry sky. Sleight of hand to brighten the heroine's "hemophilia of tears," fun with shaving cream that ends with the protagonist with a red "X" across his chest. Visual music, Prokofiev (bare torsos in a slow-mo scuffle) and Chaplin (the yearning for the childlike gaze) and Bowie (the camera rushing to keep up with the ecstatic laceration of Lavant's full-body spasm). Alphaville for the glass tower guarded by lasers, Blazing Saddles for the getaway. (An earlier gag has Serge Reggiani with cigar and lapdog bumping into Piccoli as the two launch into grunting pantomime in half-silhouette.) "Burns quickly but last forever," not the visiting comet but cinema's abnormal beauty, Carax closes gloriously with the gamine in flight. Cinematography by Jean-Yves Escoffier. With Hans Meyer, Carroll Brooks, Hugo Pratt, and Mireille Perrier.
--- Fernando F. Croce |